Issues with Kingston KC300 60GB SSDs?

[Soundy]

I have three "appliance" systems now, all complete systems manufactured within a month of two of each other... and all three are showing the same symptoms. I'm 99.99% certain I've narrowed down the problem, I just want to see what everyone else here thinks.

All three systems use the same power supply (Antec High Current Gamer 520W) and same motherboard (Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3H). From the manufacturer, the two 1TB Seagate SV3.5 HDDs are plugged into two of the four upward-facing SATA2 ports, and the SSD is plugged into the side-facing SATA3 port.

All three systems, within a couple months of being installed, started randomly rebooting, then stopping with a "system not found" error. A soft reboot (CTRL-ALT-DEL) doesn't do any good (same error), and going into the BIOS, the system SSD isn't visible, and the preferred boot disk is changed to one of the internal storage HDDs. A power cycle allows the system to fire right back up, where it will run anywhere from around 8 to 36 hours before crashing again.

On the first system that manifested the problem, I first moved the SSD to the side-facing SATA2 port... no improvement. I tried a new SATA cable... no dice. I swapped in a loaner system and sent the failing one back for warranty repair.

While it was gone, a second site started reporting the same problem. I told them how to work around it (power cycle) until I got the "repaired" first system back, so I could take my loaner to the second site. The second machine is now in for warranty repair.

Within a day of this, the first site called to report their system was doing the same thing again. As far as I could determine, the ONLY thing the manufacturer did was to re-install their image (Windows, software and registration), bench it for a little while, then send it back. So I cloned the system SSD onto one of the storage HDDs, then unplugged the SSD - that system has been running flawlessly since then. On a whim, a couple days ago, I stopped by the site and plugged both storage drives into the side SATA ports - I don't know which got the SATA2 port and which got the SATA3, but suffice to say, it's still running rock-solid.

In the last few days, a third site called to report the same issues. This one is in a town 4 hours away, so remoted in, cloned their SSD system drive onto one of the storage drives, and had the manager on site unplug the SSD. We'll see over the next couple days if this helps...

So to me, this rules out everything except the SSD in the first case... with the second, it remains to be seem how the manufacturer will deal with it. For the third, the next 48 hours will be telling... but I strongly suspect it will remain stable now.

Anyone think of anything I missed?

And has anyone heard anything about a "bad batch" of Kingston KC300 60GB SSDs?

 

[digitaldoc]

I looked around, but have not heard of any specific issues with the Kingston 60 GB SSD's. In fact, I could not find any issues with their drives in general.

 

[Qwarzz]

I have three "appliance" systems now, all complete systems manufactured within a month of two of each other... and all three are showing the same symptoms. I'm 99.99% certain I've narrowed down the problem, I just want to see what everyone else here thinks.

All three systems use the same power supply (Antec High Current Gamer 520W) and same motherboard (Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3H). From the manufacturer, the two 1TB Seagate SV3.5 HDDs are plugged into two of the four upward-facing SATA2 ports, and the SSD is plugged into the side-facing SATA3 port.

All three systems, within a couple months of being installed, started randomly rebooting, then stopping with a "system not found" error. A soft reboot (CTRL-ALT-DEL) doesn't do any good (same error), and going into the BIOS, the system SSD isn't visible, and the preferred boot disk is changed to one of the internal storage HDDs. A power cycle allows the system to fire right back up, where it will run anywhere from around 8 to 36 hours before crashing again.

...

I'm slightly late with this but how did end? Did you find a fix for the problem or were the drives replaced with something else?
I'm interested in this since We've run in to similar problems. A few drives are acting in a similar way. No test shows anything wrong but after hours or a few days operating system will crash and the SSD does not get identified by the BIOS until power has been turned off and back on, just reseting won't work.

Would have been nice to know what the firmware was on the disks. The firmware on our disks is 600ABBF0 which is newer than what Kingston has available on their site.

This problem definitely isn't very wide spread since there's almost nothing to be found on google. Could be some obscure device combination or something.

 

[Soundy]

I'm slightly late with this but how did end? Did you find a fix for the problem or were the drives replaced with something else?
I'm interested in this since We've run in to similar problems. A few drives are acting in a similar way. No test shows anything wrong but after hours or a few days operating system will crash and the SSD does not get identified by the BIOS until power has been turned off and back on, just reseting won't work.

Would have been nice to know what the firmware was on the disks. The firmware on our disks is 600ABBF0 which is newer than what Kingston has available on their site.

This problem definitely isn't very wide spread since there's almost nothing to be found on google. Could be some obscure device combination or something.

After sending two systems back to the manufacturer, only to have them returned to us "repaired" and then having the problem occur again within a couple weeks... we ended up just leaving the SSDs out of the loop entirely - cloned them to one of the spinny drives, unplugged them, and just went with that. All of them have been stable in that configuration.

Like you, I've never found anything else specific on this problem. This manufacturer has dozens if not hundreds of these machines out in the wild with the same configuration, and SUPPOSEDLY the four systems we've had do this have been unique... although their support is notoriously tight-lipped and even if they had a 90% failure rate with other customers they'd never admit to it... I suspect we're just the only ones who have been smart enough to troubleshoot it for them and figure out a work-around. In fairness, we have two or three dozen of these same configuration in service and it's only been four or five that have had the issue.

Sorry I don't really have anything more useful. If they were my own systems, or out of warranty, I might have swapped for different SSDs, even just for testing/troubleshooting purposes... with this happening just a few months into a three-year hardware warranty, we decided to just go with a low-impact work-around.

We did have one machine fail in another way and needed to go in for warranty repair, so we just plugged the SSD back in and hid the cloned partition on the spinny drive and they never said anything about it... when it came back, we re-instated our work-around.

 

[Qwarzz]

After sending two systems back to the manufacturer, only to have them returned to us "repaired" and then having the problem occur again within a couple weeks... we ended up just leaving the SSDs out of the loop entirely - cloned them to one of the spinny drives, unplugged them, and just went with that. All of them have been stable in that configuration.

Like you, I've never found anything else specific on this problem. This manufacturer has dozens if not hundreds of these machines out in the wild with the same configuration, and SUPPOSEDLY the four systems we've had do this have been unique... although their support is notoriously tight-lipped and even if they had a 90% failure rate with other customers they'd never admit to it... I suspect we're just the only ones who have been smart enough to troubleshoot it for them and figure out a work-around. In fairness, we have two or three dozen of these same configuration in service and it's only been four or five that have had the issue.

Sorry I don't really have anything more useful. If they were my own systems, or out of warranty, I might have swapped for different SSDs, even just for testing/troubleshooting purposes... with this happening just a few months into a three-year hardware warranty, we decided to just go with a low-impact work-around.

We did have one machine fail in another way and needed to go in for warranty repair, so we just plugged the SSD back in and hid the cloned partition on the spinny drive and they never said anything about it... when it came back, we re-instated our work-around.

Expected as much...

All this does seem very similar to the problem I had on my own system with Kingston HyperX SSD but that got fixed with a firmware update. That update had note "Fixed a power management condition where the device failed to respond to a COMWAKE, which might have resulted in the SSD becoming unresponsive thereby requiring a reset by the host."

 

[Soundy]

All this does seem very similar to the problem I had on my own system with Kingston HyperX SSD but that got fixed with a firmware update. That update had note "Fixed a power management condition where the device failed to respond to a COMWAKE, which might have resulted in the SSD becoming unresponsive thereby requiring a reset by the host."

Pretty sure I checked the firmware at the time, and even contacted Kingston, to no avail. You noted that your troubled drives came with a newer firmware than Kingston had on their site, too. I should have photos of the drives somewhere, with their serial numbers... not sure if that helps. Surprised I can't find more emails relating to it all, it was only a year ago.

 

[Soundy]

Here's one photo of one of the affected drives...


View Screen Capture

 

[Qwarzz]

Here's one photo of one of the affected drives...


View Screen Capture

Thanks. That drive is indeed with the same firmware.